Shared by Aharon Varady on ג׳ בניסן ה׳תשע״א (April 7, 2011) 
How good are you playing this amazing, venerable role-playing game called Judaism? Playing your whole life? Grand. So is it fun? Is it worthwhile? Would you recommend it to your friends? No. All right… so why not? Oh. Yeah. Oh… true. Ok, yeah, those are all good reasons. But what if I told you there was a way to play it better. Not everyone will catch on at first, but it should satisfy the most conservative players AND the most innovative. The geeks will love it and it will lower the bar for entry to even the most simple of players. Ok, it does sound too good to be true. But hey, what’s the point of playing the game if you’re not willing to suspend the physics of the familiar and try on a new set of rules. Embrace the illusion. Try on a new reality. Help create a new one, together. I just want players to use their imagination, feel appreciated instead of alienated, and just improve the game for everyone. So what is it? I’ll tell you. . . . → Read More: The afikoman hiding in plain sight
Shared by Efraim Feinstein on ד׳ באדר ב׳ ה׳תשע״א (March 10, 2011) 
This post continues the series of advocacy posts directed at Jewish content creators and aggregators. Other parts of the series discussed the global communal benefit of free primary data resources and issues of copyright license compatibility and the connection between copyright licensing and remixability. While my previous post briefly mentioned the non-free Creative Commons licenses, this post details why you should choose a free culture license. In particular, it urges you to avoid the licenses with the non-commercial-use only (NC) terms. . . . → Read More: Just say NO to NC — choose a *free* Creative Commons license
Shared by Aharon Varady on ח׳ בשבט ה׳תשע״א (January 13, 2011) 
To help creators of new works navigate the panoply of free/libre, open source, and copyleft licenses, I made a decision tree flowchart as an image map with clickable links to respective licenses and relevant articles. . . . → Read More: A Decision Tree for Choosing Free/Libre Licenses for Cultural and Technological Work
Shared by Aharon Varady on י״ט בכסלו ה׳תשע״א (November 26, 2010) 
Given that more than 50% of the Siddur is comprised of text from the תנ׳׳ך (TaNaKh) any project that seeks to rigorously attribute its sources depends on a critical, digital edition of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew bible. And such is the case for our Open Siddur Project. The entire history of the transmission . . . → Read More: A Tale of Two Codexes: The Aleppo and Westminster Leningrad Codex of the תנ׳׳ך
Shared by Efraim Feinstein on י׳ בכסלו ה׳תשע״א (November 17, 2010) In an insightful blog post on eJewish Philanthropy — which you should read if you haven’t already — Russel Neiss writes “[w]hile we have had many illuminating conversations since our presentation [at the JFNA General Assembly], the questions and feedback we have received overwhelmingly surrounds the first value of “Open, Discoverable and Accessible.”” He refers . . . → Read More: Openness, remixability, and free culture
Shared by Aharon Varady on ל׳ בשבט ה׳תש״ע (February 14, 2010) Over at Darim Online‘s blog, Phillip Brodsky reflects on Apple’s release of the iPad and asks some leading questions concerning the future of the book with the “People of the Book”, similar to J.T. Waldman’s posts on JPS’ blog last June and July last year. Considering e-readers and e-book formats, Brodsky asks,
How might the . . . → Read More: Access, sharing, and innovation through digitization
Shared by Efraim Feinstein on כ״ה בשבט ה׳תש״ע (February 9, 2010) There are two principles on which the success of data on the contemporary web rests: the web makes content available, and it adds value to that content by linking it to other related information.
When considering bringing old content online, both of these aspects are important. A first level of digitization involves simply making data . . . → Read More: An Economic Argument for Free Primary Data
Shared by Efraim Feinstein on ב׳ בכסלו ה׳תש״ע (November 19, 2009) The free culture community has developed mechanisms to make sharing and collaborative development easier. The principles that define works of free culture are:
- the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
- the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
- the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
- the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works
Note that these freedoms do not discriminate on the basis of endeavor, and all free culture works allow creation of derivative works and commercial use. . . . → Read More: Jewish Content, Free Culture and “Content Compatibility”
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